Being the adventures of an English major working on a Ph.D. thesis about Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

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Tag Archives: Theodor. W. Adorno

Editing is time travel. I am both cursing and congratulating my past selves on writing such erudite rubbish which is growing into a finished thesis that does not exist yet. Sitting in the middle, surrounded by books and notes scribbled on the backs of articles and papers is a rather confused but also confident present me.

Oh, and after eight successful shows (four more to come), I have finally managed to finish reading Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory backstage between Acts 2 and 3. If you think German philosophy is needlessly complicated, have a go at an English translation thereof. There’s a lot of useful knowledge in Adorno, don’t get me wrong – but in order to attain it, you have to navigate a jungle of Germanic pretentiousness and lengthy wordings.

Hey y’all. My presentation on Pratchett went well – so well, in fact, that I can repeat it in a week at a meet’n’greet day for literary critics of our Uni. Now I’ll just have to translate my slides from English because the German seminar launched the whole event and I don’t want to confuse them any more than necessary.

Apart from that, next week’s lesson includes The Light Fantastic and the first half of Witches Abroad. I’ll still have to figure out how to squeeze in so much content into two hours.

Oh, and my new summary of my methodology and theoretical background is also due in a week. Once again, busy times, good times… this time with Adorno and Lyotard to follow me around. (Memo: Ghosts of postmodernism past and present?)